The Illusion of Control After Hours

This is the Truth Network. Coming to you from an entrenched barricade deep in the heart of central North Carolina, Masculine Journey After Hours.

A time to go deeper and be more transparent on the topic covered on this week's broadcast. So sit back and join us on this adventure. The Masculine Journey After Hours starts here now. Welcome to Masculine Journey After Hours.

Robby's making me laugh, so thank you, Robby. I appreciate that. Welcome to Masculine Journey After Hours. We are talking about a topic that I think pretty much every human I've ever met struggles with it to some degree, either openly or privately. They may say they don't. I don't think they're being truthful.

But at some point, maybe in their lifetime, they don't struggle with it as they've given everything over to God. But Harold, what is the topic? This is your topic this week, so let us know what that is. The topic is the illusion of control. We think we control what we really don't control. And I'm going to be quick on this introduction.

The illusion of control is a psychological phenomenon where individuals believe they have more influence over outcomes than they actually do. And I think that fits probably everyone, as you said. Yeah, I think if we are honest, we really look in the mirror, we can say, yeah, that's something that resembles me at least some of the time, if not most of the time, depending on your situation. And so, on the phone, we have Danny. Danny, welcome to the After Hours. Oh, glad to be here. Okay, did I wake you up? Sorry, man. Yeah, I took that 10 minute nap.

Usually people do it during our show, not during the break. Well, I'm trying to reform, you know what I mean? Yeah, I get it, I get it. Well, Jim, you have the first clip of this show that will at least make one person very happy in this group. Well, two.

I'm a real fan, too. Well, that's true. This is from the outlaw Josie Wales, and for those not familiar with it, why not? But this takes place during the Civil War, and this is at the end when they are surrendering, and it was a really nasty, primarily guerrilla warfare between Kansas, which was a union state, and Missouri, which was a southern state. But it's beginning of the movie, though. Yeah, this is the very beginning of the movie. End of the war, beginning of the movie.

Yes, and it'd be a very short movie if it was just about the war. But anyway, there are a number of characters in this. Josie Fletcher, who was the commander of the unit that Josie was part of, and Captain Terrell, who, well, you'll hear Red Legs, which was their nickname, and that was true of most of the folks from Kansas.

So you've got enemies talking here, and the governor is, well, you'll know enough about him, but listen to what's happening with the different characters here. And there's a kid whose name I don't remember. Billy?

Billy the Kid. I got it. It took a while. But no, it may be, actually. But let's play it, and we'll talk when we get to the end. Okay. Put the rifle down, too.

I'll be needing this for squirrels and such. Put it down. Kind of young, ain't you, kid? Be riding with this rabble? Who you calling rabble, you blue scumbelly? Here's the man you asked for, sir.

Ah, Fletcher. Good to see you, Senator. Well done.

Thank you. War's over. Our side won the war. Now we must busy ourselves winning the peace. And Fletcher, there's an old saying, to the victors belong the spoils.

That is this man on, Senator. Easy, Terrell. He brought them all in, didn't he?

All but one. Who's with that? Josie Will. Captain Terrell, I want you to currycomb the countryside. You beat the brush and root out everything disloyal from a Shanghai rooster to a Durham cow.

We've got to clean up this country. Now you take five men and go up there and get Josie Will's. Captain Redlegs, Terrell. And five men against Josie Will's.

This is some characters that I know pretty well because I've watched this movie a lot. But Terrell thinks he can get him. He can't. And I've called him a governor, but Senator thinks he's in control and is ordering men about and nothing he wants to do happens. Fletcher and Josie Will's were good friends and Fletcher betrayed him and now he's part of the party that's hunting Josie down. And war is always that way. What you decide is going to happen rarely does.

And conflict of any type is going to usually teach us that our illusion of control is that, an illusion. And the ultimate outcome for this is nothing like you expect when you get the opening scenes of the movie where Josie Will's is out farming and that was the life he expected to have. He ends up being an outlaw and killing a lot of folks.

It's a good revenge movie if you like those. Yeah. Art, any idea what a Shanghai rooster or a Durham cow is? I'm like not a farmer so those terms stood out to me and I'm not being silly.

I just don't have any clue what they mean. I didn't know if you would. Not really.

Okay. Shanghai rooster, that's a Chinese rooster, right? I guess, I don't know. Yeah, I mean it might be. Yeah, in Durham I thought it was the Bulls and it's a baseball team over in Raleigh. Yeah, those are old, old, old terms. I don't know. I knew they meant something but I'm the least farmer guy probably in here and so I thought I'd ask the most farmer guy in here.

And so if you don't know him I feel pretty good about not knowing him. You see it's good that I brought up cows earlier so now we have a clip with talking about cows. We came full circle. Right. Yeah, it was meant to be, Art.

It really was meant to be. Danny, you were talking about timing earlier today. There we go again. There it is, timing.

And people would, some people would think that we do a lot of full here. Oh yeah. And also just in that clip where you've got all that going on, Fletcher, he actually was Josie's friend. He was a friend of all the guys who ended up getting shot which you did not have in the clip because you talked about it and then you jumped past it. But each one of those guys came in and said, okay, I'll give myself up and they just shot him. And then Josie was against him because he got one guy out of there who died a few days later but all that goes on and happens and it's just kind of real time, real life.

And it's just, when you put all that together, it's just, it's hard as this think about, wow, what if this and then the next thing and the next thing. Well, you know, he betrayed them but for what, to become dean of Faber College? Right. I mean that's really – And Fletcher did talk to the senator about it afterwards in a not terribly friendly tone.

You said you'll be decently treated and yes, we already did that joke. No, we didn't do it. He later went on to become dean wormer. Yeah, he did.

And it's very important. I could have sworn I just heard Sam say it. It was close. I said Faber College. It was not his name. Okay.

We were on the same one. But in the meantime, just so you'll know, a Shanghai rooster, right, this name was commonly used in the United States during the 1800s to refer to a large, heavily feathered fowl. Wow.

Okay. And so – And you haven't looked up the Durham bull, which is – where are the Durham bulls? Well, I would think that – Well, Durham cow is what they said in the – What he said – and that's something that would live in the south, right?

And he's trying to find the betrayers and you can imagine these Durham cows, you know, they were moving – Moving. Yeah, we got in the wrong direction. We knew where you were going with that, Robby. We've been around you enough. Yeah. And the others were like – anyway. That was bad. Yeah. We're good with that one, too. I'm not going to horn in on this conversation.

Just ram it on in. Let's go. Here we go. I had a thought, but it went away.

We tend to do that to people. You lost control, Jim. Yeah, you did. I never had it. You're dead, Jim.

Never had it. Yeah. Anyway, Robby, you actually have the next clip.

All right. Well – I'm going to turn the camera on. Yeah, it's kind of awkward to get myself on camera. You know, just the cameraman has to put it.

It's just weird. But anyway – Harold, just to give you a different – Yeah, Harold, do you want to go from the mic? Those of you who didn't understand that, you listen to the first show and you'll see I almost came back with a nub. Anyway, speaking of losing control, man, those who watched Jaws, I hope you did.

But it's a pretty famous movie. If you didn't, the captain of the boat that goes after Jaws, who loves to call people chief, here is explaining why he has the hatred for sharks that he does, is he was on a Navy heavy cruiser, as Jim described to me, that you would have thought he was carrying – you know, days before they were carrying the bomb that would be dropped on Hiroshima that would kill obviously millions of people, and you would think that they thought that they were in control. And they certainly were well armed except for there was a Japanese torpedo boat or submarine that caused this to happen. And pretty soon they went from being – you know, thinking they were pretty bad to like being in the water with just a big fish with very large teeth. And what happens is an idea of what's happened to many of us when we lose control. And then at the end of this clip, I wish you could see it as well as, you know, you could hear it. And the point is that the chief of police there in Amityville is – he's feeding chum to the water, thinking that he's going to bring a shark on, and all of a sudden Jaws shows up and you can hear what he tells the captain shortly thereafter.

But it is historically accurate, that description. Here we go. Japanese submarine slammed two torpedoes into her side, chief. She was coming back from the island of Tinian Delady and just delivered the bomb, the Hiroshima bomb. Eleven hundred men went into the water. The vessel went down in twelve minutes. Didn't see the first shark for about half an hour. Tiger, thirteen footer. You know how you know that when you're in the water, chief? You tell by looking from the dorsal to the tail.

What we didn't know was our bomb mission had been so secret, no distress signal had been sent. Very first light, chief. Sharks come cruising. So we formed ourselves into tight groups.

You know, kind of like old squares in a battle, like you see in the calendar, like the Battle of Waterloo. And the idea was, shark comes to the nearest man, and that man, he starts pounding and hollering and screaming. Sometimes the shark go away.

Sometimes he wouldn't go away. Sometimes that shark, he looks right into you. Right into your eyes. You know the thing about a shark, he's got lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll's eyes.

When he comes at you, doesn't seem to be living until he bites you. And those black eyes roll over white and then, in spite of all the pounding and the hollering, they all come in and rip you to pieces. I can go slow ahead. Come on down and chum some of this.

You're going to need a bigger boat. Yeah. You know, and you listen to that description of when all of a sudden you get a look at death.

Yeah. And, you know, I was going to use a different example, but God just put it on my heart to tell you this one. So, you know, at one point in my life, I got something called a brain abscess that came from a staph infection that was inserted in my brain through a surgery that I had. And that staph infection went out of control. And, you know, a few weeks before that, you know, I was the Chrysler dealer in Mocksville. I thought life was going well. You know, I had three kids. Things were pretty amazing. And they couldn't get it to stop and they couldn't get it to stop.

And they did two surgeries, not unlike Sam's Danny's description. And one day, you know, I knew I was getting sicker and sicker and I was losing consciousness more and more. And the nurse came in and she was like, you know, Mr. Dilmore, this is the last thing we know to try.

And you probably need to make whatever arrangements, you know, because it won't be long. And I say that just to say this, what he described when death looks you in the eye. And I don't know if through your life, a lot of people have experienced whatever that looked like in their life when death looked him in the eye. And when it looks at you like that, it does not have any sense of heart to it. It's cold, however.

Yeah, sure is. However, but God, right? And at that moment in time, hopefully God allows you the humility to feel that stream of living water that he's been building in your life since you came to Christ.

And that living water looks so different than that black look of death. And from my standpoint, I kept a special Bible at that time in the hospital. And for whatever reason, God gave me the insight to make all the entries into that Bible because, you know, I'm like a lot of people take notes in this Bible, that particular Bible.

I made all my entries in red pen as I went through that particular journey in my life. And those entries in that Bible are of unbelievable value to me. Like any time that I need a testimony to say, look, God is not, you know, what you're going through, look what you went through. And he was right there. And he wasn't just there from a standpoint of, well, I'm going to keep you alive because obviously he was going to heal me. I'd been in heaven, right? He was going to give me more and more and more life, less of that black look of death that you get as you walk with him through life. And sometimes those brushes with those black eyes help us to value his word in certain parts of the things that he's done in your testimony.

It's just beyond value, right, Nanny? You're absolutely right. The death looks you in the face. And we had an oncologist a month or so ago look at me now and say, this is incurable and inoperable. And, you know, we asked tough questions. And she said, you know, best case scenario or average was about a year or two left.

And, you know, we came home just devastated that, you know, time could be short. But like you said, Robby, but God. And I believe God is doing something miraculous. If nothing else, he's made me see how valuable time is.

You know, every moment with my wife, every moment with my children, every podcast I get to do like this, everything is just. It's living water. And I enjoy going up toward the mountains in those trout streams up there. And we went up to an area that had been ravaged somewhat by the hurricane. But one thing I noticed was you didn't stop the living water running down the mountain.

All the devastation, but the water still ran. It's beautiful. Thank you. Thank you, Dan. Well, that was powerful.

Now I can't really even play my clip. So I'll just ask Rodney. Rodney, anything you'd like to add to this topic? You just go through, you know, you've got Robby's wonderful description of something from a movie into his real life. Danny kicks in his. I can kick in some stuff. Everybody can kick in with this is what's got me now. It's got you down. It's got you up.

It's got you sideways. Something is always in control of us. And as long as we understand that it's God that's got control, ultimate control.

He's he's in charge of everything. Nothing's going to happen without him just going, yeah, I'm going to either let it happen or he's going to make it happen. I mean, like for me, getting saved, I didn't do that. I didn't save myself. I didn't figure something out and realize, oh, God's there. No, he told me, come to me. It was a, you know, a great time in my life that I was like, oh, my gosh, you are real.

You are true. And I didn't know I was just listening to things. You know, I the things I was listening to.

Yeah, they were Dr. J. Vernon McGee. And I was just listening to stuff and I was like, oh, this is really good. And then later on, I'm just listening and I'm like, oh, my gosh, Lord, you are you are real. And it just dawned on me. It's like, oh, my gosh, I'm saved.

And it was just one of those things that just comes out. It's just so much more meaningful than just, well, oh, yeah, I'm saved. You just go on.

No, it's vitally important for eternity that we're saved. And it's nothing that's small. It's something that's very, very important for us all to really think through and put our hopes and dreams into because there's nothing else is going to do. But God, he just he does it all. And you do nothing.

You just accept and take and go and say, thank you. Yeah, that's about all you can do. Yeah. I'm going to go ahead and switch gears a little bit.

Thank you. And play a clip because what what if your intentions are good? You really have a good intention for, you know, why you feel like you need to control this because it's for everybody's best interest.

And so I can't think of anyone that makes that point as much as Clark Griswold in Christmas Vacation, when he just wants his family to have the picture perfect Christmas and they just won't cooperate. They just won't get along. And let's see how he responds to it. Then we'll come back and wrap up this topic. Where do you think you're going? Nobody's leaving. Nobody's walking out on this fun old fashioned family Christmas.

No, no. We're all in this together. This is a full blown four alarm holiday emergency here. We're going to press on and we're going to have the hap hap happiest Christmas since Bing Crosby tap dance with Danny K. And when Santa squeezes down that chimney night, he's going to find the jolliest bunch of this side of the nuthouse.

Hey, if any of you are looking for any last minute gift ideas for me, I have one. I'd like Frank Shirley, my boss, right here tonight. I want him bought from his happy holiday slumber over there in Melody Lane with all the other rich people. And I want him bought right here with a big ribbon on his head.

And I want to look him straight in the eye and I want to tell him what a cheap, lying, no good, rotten, four flushing, low life, snake licking, dirt eating, inbred, overstuffed, ignorant, blood sucking, dog kissing, brainless, hopeless, heartless, bug eyed, stiff legged, spotty lip, worm headed, sack of monkey shit he is. Hallelujah. Where's the title?

Yeah, never heard of a sack of monkeys. But we just did. Where's the title at all?

Where's the title at all? But, you know, his intentions were good. His execution was horrible.

And as a result, it ruined everybody's time. And I can resemble that so many times of really wanting to do the right thing and the good thing and what I thought was where I should be doing. But I'm trying to do it within my own power. Right? And it just doesn't really work out. And if I'm really unlucky, it does work out sometimes because then I think I can make it work out the next time and the next time and the next time.

Right? And so the question I want us to leave with is I just want to ask you guys, when you've let it down and you've given the control over to God, what has been the net result in your life? What have you felt? What have you taken on?

Danny, I want to start with you since you're on the phone. Yeah, with this journey, right before we went to the first surgery, we were in a prayer group and I saw a vision of God had me in the palms of his hand. He had his hands cupped over me. And I may have shared this on the air, but… And he said, I've got this and I've got you, but don't look through my fingers. And how I had to realize that, you know what, this was going to be beyond my control, but I tried to manage it. And, you know, as I shared earlier, but, you know, God is in control. He is absolutely, positively in control. And, you know, so illusions are shattered. I don't mean I won't try to control something tomorrow, maybe even late this evening, who knows? But… Yeah.

Robby? I was just thinking, you know, of a particular instance where, you know, my computer mouse became just fully operational. And my stapler, like… Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a boot camp reference reflecting me.

I get it. They both didn't make it out alive, either one of them, actually. When I thought of the Clark Griswold rant, I couldn't help but remember a certain, you know, computer mouse that, you know, took a beating.

It did. But it kept on, you know… And my buddy Harold brought me a metal stapler that I cannot break. And so I have not even tried.

It's too intimidating. But I think we all have those monuments in our life, right, of things that just got us to the point we did something totally ridiculous, whether that was put your hand through, you know, the headlight. I heard this story this week of, you know, got so jealous he put his hand… I think it was Raymond's dad got so jealous over some guy that was dating Mrs… Yeah, Raymond's mom. Raymond's mom, you know. But, you know, I put my hand through a few walls, doors, you know, just out of complete anger.

I became a kickboxer, not unlike somebody sitting next to me. And obviously a biter. That's in this category too. But it's fascinating, isn't it? Yeah.

It is. But my favorite one of them all, you know, is when I was reading the Book of Job and all of a sudden, you know, God asked me, you know, oh, Robby, you know, since you've got it all under control, why don't you make it snow or, you know, make the tide come in just one time? And when I let go of that control, he saved me.

Yeah. Yeah, I guess my answer would be when I really just understand, God, I just got to give you control, there's a sense of peace that comes over me. Not that everything's worked out, not that I know what the outcome's going to be, but at the end of the day, it doesn't matter. God knows what the outcome's going to be.

You're not responsible for the outcome. I don't know that. There's a lot of peace there. It is, and there's this peace that happens on the backside that doesn't change my situation, but changes me in the midst of my situation.

And that means everything. Go to masculinejourney.org to register for the upcoming bootcamp, November 20th through 23rd. We'll talk with you next week. Love each other well, and we'll talk to you soon. This is the Truth Network.